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In South, Korean Unity Appealing in Abstract Only

Sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor of her living room, across from a plastic basketball hoop with a picture of a beaming Michael Jordan that her son had stuck to the wall, Kim Sun Ye shrugged and wriggled in embarrassment and finally blurted out the heresy.

''For ordinary people, unification will cause a lot of problems,'' said Ms. Kim, a 33-year-old farm wife in this little village near the North Korean border. ''I don't honestly know if it's a good thing.''

Then she giggled again in horror and paused, as if to see whether Mother Korea might strike her dead with a lightning bolt.

This heresy is becomingly increasingly common, but it still makes people profoundly uncomfortable. It challenges the holy teaching that Koreans are nurtured on -- that the overwhelming national goal must be to unify with North Korea as soon as possible.

All across South Korea, on city streets and in villages like this, ordinary people like Ms. Kim are beginning to voice such doubts as they think about unification in a concrete sense, as something that might actually happen any time because of the hunger and economic crisis in North Korea.

And some are finding to their shock and dismay that unification -- Korea's sacred cause for half a century -- is not necessarily what they want right now.

So some South Koreans are coming to regard unification the way Saint Augustine felt about virtue, in his prayer: ''Please give me chastity, but not yet.''

Kumgok is a little village of about 700 people, with a jutting mountain of dense forests behind it and vivid green rice paddies unfurled in front of it, about two hours' drive northwest of Seoul on winding roads flanked by periodic tank traps intended to stop any North Korean invasion. It is just one randomly chosen village, but it seems to be torn by the same ambivalence toward the North as is the rest of the country, riven by fault lines that divide neighbor from neighbor.

There are old peasants like Kim Wan Seok, who has family members in the North and yearns for unification as soon as possible so that he can visit his old home and bring his relatives to live here in Kumgok. Then there are women like Suh Myong Ok, who does not sound welcoming toward Mr. Kim's long-lost relatives, as she frets about the possibility of hordes of North Koreans descending on villages like this.

''Just think about it,'' she muttered darkly, shaking her head. ''All those people flooding down here. It'd make life very difficult for us.''

Shin Jin Kyun, a carpenter who lives nearby, said he felt sorry for North Koreans but suggested that their mind-set is different.

''It's possible,'' he said delicately, ''that they are not so honest.''

The famine that is reportedly sweeping the North is now testing the traditional patriotic mantras about all Koreans being members of the same family. The most obvious saviors for the hungry North are people in the South, and some South Koreans argue fervently that they should be doing more for their ''brothers and sisters'' in the North. But for others, the talk about kinship is fine so long as it does not mean higher taxes.

''Why should we give them money?'' said Lee Han Gwee, a 69-year-old widow who was sorting red peppers by her house to make kimchi. ''They should work for their own food and money. They have plenty of land up there.''

Lee Geum Lan, a 58-year-old woman, frowned and said: ''We don't even have enough food for ourselves. Why should we send it to the North?''

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Yet there is sympathy for the North as well as suspicion, and arguments among the villagers are common. When Shin Il Kyun, a pudgy 60-year-old with a fringe of gray around his bald pate, suggested that after unification it would be a mistake to allow North Koreans to vote, his neighbor, Park Ki Woon, looked at him in outrage.

''That would make the North Koreans our slaves!'' Mr. Park declared, waving his hand, his animation perhaps fortified by the cup of clear liquor he had just drunk. ''South Korea would be making North Korea a colony, just as we all used to be the slaves of Japan.''

Mr. Shin shook his head sharply. If North Korea offered just one candidate for president of the unified country, he suggested ominously, that candidate might well beat the handful of candidates who would compete from the South. ''So,'' he added fiercely, ''we could be ruled by North Koreans.''

Mr. Park, a lean 44-year-old, paused and reflected on that. ''Well,'' he said mildly, ''there should be a three-to-five-year transition before holding presidential elections.'' In that interim, he explained, it would be best for South Koreans to rule the country.

To be sure, the two Koreas are among the most nationalistic countries in the world, and eventual reunification remains a deeply felt patriotic goal. Mr. Park said he worried about the cost of reunification and the economic consequences, but he added a common mantra:

''Everybody in Korea wants unification to happen as soon as possible,'' he said. ''That's obvious to everyone.''

At least it used to be. In the last few years a growing number of Korean and Western studies began to look at the financial burden on West Germany from the absorption of East Germany in 1990 and began to calculate the cost to South Korea of unifying with the North. The estimates of the cost vary enormously, from about $130 billion up to $2 trillion, but they all suggest that the economic dislocations would be staggering for the South.

It is startling how many ordinary people in South Korea, whether on the street in Seoul or in a little village like Kumgok, can knowledgeably discuss trends in Germany's post-unification G.N.P. All this has left South Koreans torn between the patriotic yearning for unification and their reluctance to risk a surge in unemployment and taxes.

''A lot of people in private will tell me what they regard as a confession: that they want reunification, but only after they are dead,'' said Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropologist at George Washington University who is completing a book on South Korean attitudes toward the North. Professor Grinker added that the experience of North Korean defectors in the South underscores how difficult the North's adjustment to capitalism will be.

''Half of the 800 known North Korean defectors in the South are unemployed,'' he said. ''They suffer from depression and emotional distress and other problems, and they are to some extent a model of how difficult it is to cross the border between the two Koreas.''

The tangle of complex feelings toward North Koreans is raising new questions about what would happen if the two nations did actually unify. The division of the two Koreas remains the greatest remaining challenge left over from the cold war, but the ambivalence in South Korea underscores that unification would be an immensely complex and painful process that could require a generation to complete.

South Korea is already torn apart by regional rivalries that go back many centuries, particularly between the southwest and the southeast, and unification would add a new overlay of provincial antagonisms. For while many people repeat the refrain that ''we are all one family'' or ''we are all flesh and blood,'' they often look horrified when asked whether after reunification they would allow a son or daughter to marry a North Korean.

''I would not allow my kids to marry a North Korean,'' Roh Geum Hee, a housewife with permed hair and gold earrings, declared worriedly as she stood in the entrance to her house in Kumgok. ''Since they are from the North, I can't trust them. I don't know what they are thinking.''

She paused and added softly, ''I can't just change my attitude all of a sudden and welcome them here.''

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A version of this article appears in print on August 31, 1997, on Page 1001010 of the National edition with the headline: In South, Korean Unity Appealing in Abstract Only. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe